Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)

as well as to understand about wrong action and about inaction one has to understand ; thick and tangled is the way of works/* Action in the world is like a deep forest, gahana, through which man goes stumbling as best he can, by the light of the ideas of his time, the standards of his personality, his environment,/ or rather of many times, many personalities, layers of thought and ethics from many social stages all inextricably confused together, temporal and conventional amidst all their claim to absoluteness and immutable truth, empirical and irrational in spite of their aping of right reason. And finally the sage seeking in the midst of it all a highest foundation of fixed law and an original truth finds himself obliged to raise the last supreme question, whether all action and life itself are not a delusion and a snare and whether cessation from action, akarma, is not the last resort of the tired and disillusioned human soul. But, says Krishna, in this matter even the sages are perplexed and deluded. For^lby action, by works, not by inaction comes the knowledge and the release})

What then is the solution ? what is that type of works by which we shall be released from the ills of life, from this doubt, this error, this griel^ from this mixed, impure and baffling result even of our purest and best-intentioned acts, from these million forms of evil and suffering? No outward distinctions need be made, is the reply ; no work the world needs, be shunned ; no limit or hedge set round our human activities ; on the contrary. THE DIVINE WORKER

^11 actions should be done, but from a soul in Yoga with the Divine, yuktah kr*itsna-karma-kr*it. A karma, cessation from action is not the way ; the man who has attained to the insight of the highest reason, perceives that such inaction is itself a constant action, a state subject to the workings of Nature and her qualities^ The mind that takes refuge in physical inactivity, is still under the delusion that it and not Nature is the doer of works ; it has mistaken inertia for liberation ; it does not see that even in what seems absolute inertia greater than that of the stone or clod. Nature is at work, keeps unimpaired her hold. On the contrary ^in the full flood of action the soul is free from its works, is not the doer, not bound by what is done, and he who lives in the freedom of the soul, not in the bondage of the modes of Nature, alone has release from works. This is what the Gita clearly means when it says that he who in action can see inaction and can see action still continuing in cessation from works; is the man of true reason) and discernment among men. This saying hinges upon the Sankhya distinction between Purusha and Prakriti, between the free inactive soul, eternally calm, pure and unmoved in the midst of works, and ever active Nature operative as much in inertia and cessation as in the overt turmoil of her visible hurry of labour. This is the knowledge which the highest effort of the discriminating reason, the buddhi, gives to us, and therefore whoever possesses it is the truly rational and discerning man, sa